by Vicki Lane
At midday me and Mama don’t fix no real dinner; we just eat us an applesauce biscuit so that Mama will have time to finish up the three-egg cake she made this morning. She takes a knife and spreads the brown sugar icing acrost the top of the cake, making fancy patterns as she goes. I can tell that she has drunk some of her tonic because the end of her nose is pink and she is humming a song.
Brother was surprised when Mama told him last week that she wanted to meet his girl and that she would make a cake. But he fixed it up just as quick as he was able afore Mama could change her mind. Brother has even paid Lilah Bel’s uncle to take his new truck to meet the train and bring them back to the foot of our road so’s Brother’s girl’ll not have to make such a long walk. Mama don’t know that part, and if she did, she would likely have something to say about it.
Because Brother’s girl is coming, I have a new dress. Mama took some plain feed sacks and she boiled the white cloth with onion skins and roots till it come up the prettiest yellow you ever saw. And then she made a collar and little pockets out of some other feed sack cloth that had green and pink and purple flowers all over it. My new dress looks like it could have come from the wish book. I will be very careful not to spoil it.
The cake is all done and setting on the table with a piece of cheesecloth over it to keep off the flies; Mama has had me lay out four of them little green glass plates that come in the boxes of oatmeal along with forks and glasses for each of us. I set them out first one way and then another.
“Quit your fooling with them plates lest you break one,” Mama says.
I am almost beside myself for this will be the first time I ever sat down with company.
“I thank you for inviting me.” Brother’s girl looks at Mama and smiles real sweet. Her and Brother have walked up the road and clumb the porch steps and she is out of breath a little. The fancy shoes that make her walk on tiptoe are dusty.
Mama don’t get up from where she’s setting with her Progressive Farmer magazine open on her lap but she nods and says, “Git you a chair and rest a spell.”
Brother’s girl takes the little rickety chair next to Mama. Her dress is the color of peach blossoms—the fanciest thing I ever seen. I watch how before she sets down she runs her hand behind her to smooth her skirt against her bottom. She perches there like a butterfly, looking so fluttery and so light. I see Brother watching her and I think he worries she will fly away.
Brother’s girl is looking all around her and saying what a pretty place it is and how fine the weather is today. Mama answers back, “Why, yes, it is,” like it surprises her.
I am setting on a little box down at the end of the porch, watching them talk and not saying nothing. Brother’s girl cuts her eyes over at me. “And talk about pretty—now, I’ll bet that pretty girl must be Least.”
Brother crooks his finger at me and I get up and walk slow over to where they’re all looking at me. Brother’s girl smiles very big and takes hold of my hand. “I hope we’re going to be good friends, Least. Your big brother has told me all about you.”
I can’t say nothing for looking at her hair. It is the color of the yellow bell flowers and it lays agin her head in big curves. I look at it the hardest, trying to figure out what makes it do like that.
“She ain’t much a hand to talk,” says Mama but Brother’s girl just laughs and brings my hand up to touch her hair.
“I believe she’s looking at my Marcel wave, aren’t you, honey? How would you like me to fix your hair like that?”
I nod my head yes and now they all of them go to laughing. Their mouths are wide open and red and make me think of bad things. “Ha-ha-ha,” they are saying and I pull my hand away and run back into the house and out the back door to one of my secret places. A blackberry briar snags the skirt of my new dress but I keep going till I can’t hear that hateful sound no more.
Back up under the big trees it is quiet and dark. I had thought I might be about to take a spell, but they ain’t no lights and the only thing I hear is the trees sighing in that lonesome talk of theirs. I stay put till I feel better and then I go to the barn.
Brother keeps the shears for the mules’ manes laying between the logs, along with the doctoring ointment and hoof picks. The shears are rusty and hard to work but once I loose the plaits, my hair cuts easier.
When I come back to the house, they are all three setting at the kitchen table, eating the cake off the green glass plates. Mama is the first to see me and her fork stops halfway to her mouth. The other two look around right quick, and before Mama can say a word, Brother’s girl has clapped her hands together and sung out, “Oh my goodness, looks like Miss Least is gone to be a hairdresser herself. Why, honey, I believe we can do you a Buster Brown bob if your mama will lend me her scissors.”
I am waiting for Lilah Bel. Every Saturday when Mama and Brother go to town, I put on my pretty yellow dress and wait for Lilah. It’s been two Saturdays since Lilah was here and I have a lot to tell her and show her—my new dress that only got one little small tear in it and Mama mended afore she washed it. The dirt came out good and the grass stain is almost gone too.
And my hair! Brother’s girl brought some special hair-washing soap with her when she come the next Sunday and she showed me how to wash my hair and tie it up in rags so it would curl pretty. Mama says it is a waste of time but being as my hair’s too short to braid, then I can fix it everhow I want for she is done fooling with it.
What I want is to be like Brother’s girl—all pretty and fluffy and dancing. For now I know about dancing. When Brother and his girl were here last Sunday and Mama stepped out back to visit the little house, Brother put out his hand and pulled his girl up off her chair and the two of them went to dancing right there on the porch. Brother was whistling and then they both begun to sing about being in Carolina in the morning. Which didn’t make no sense for it wasn’t morning a-tall, but they was jigging about and laughing like crazy folks and Brother had his arms around his girl and all the time their feet was making a song of their own, just tapping on those floorboards.
And over where I was setting and watching, my own feet begun to tap and my legs wanted to jump up and dance to the sounds they was making and the tapping and the singing was all around me till I had to close my eyes to keep from getting dizzy. At first it had seemed like a spell was coming on me but then I seen that I was being spun round by the singing, like a leaf spinning down a bold creek, and I come to see that this was a different way into that other place. I would have gone there too but just then we could hear Mama coming through the house.
Brother and his girl left off singing right quick and when Mama come out the front door, just swinging her head all around to see what all the commotion was about, they was setting on the top step, both of them looking at that Progressive Farmer magazine. I laughed inside myself to see them looking up at Mama and smiling just as calm as if they hadn’t been prancing all over our front porch not a minute before.
“Now, if you haven’t come back just in time to settle something!” says Brother’s girl. “We was wondering—which do you prefer for laying hens—Buff Orpingtons or Rhode Island Reds?”
Brother’s girl turns her head to look at me and then she closes one eye and opens it again. I know she is saying that her and Brother and me have a secret together. She is the first grown-up I have ever had a secret with and I have to wrap my arms tight around myself to keep from letting that secret bust loose. I wait till Mama has sat down and is looking at the magazine. Then I look at Brother’s girl and close and open one eye, just like she done.
Chapter 7
Anointed in the Spirit
Ridley Branch, 1931
(Lilah Bel)
Ever since the revival at the brush arbor, there have been tongues of fire licking at my body. Folks say that the Holy Spirit spoke through me that night and, now that old man Beale Blankenship has got hisself run over by a train, they say that I am anointed in the spirit and have the gift of prophecy.
I don’t know exactly when it happened. All I remember of that night is setting on the hard log bench and hearing the preacher call on the Lord to send down His Holy Spirit to anoint His people. I was hungry and hot and I begun to feel swimmie-headed so I whispered to Mama could I leave the brush arbor and go down by the river where it was cooler.
The next thing that I remember I was laying on the ground before the raised-up place where the elders was setting. The preacher was kneeling in the dust beside of me, just praying like one thing, and they was folks standing on the benches and waving their hands in the air.
And then Mama took me home. I asked her what had happened and she said that we’d speak of it later but we never have yet and it’s been close on to two weeks now.
We did not go back to the brush arbor though the revival went on for another four days. And now Mama watches me all the time with a worried kind of a look and I heard her tell Papa that she hoped I wasn’t going to begin to take fits like that poor child of Fronie’s. I wonder if that’s what happened to me and I think that I would like to go see Least and ask her if she feels the licking of the tongues of fire.
It isn’t till three weeks have passed that I find out more about what happened at the brush arbor. Me and my sister Naomi Ruth, who is fourteen years of age and thinks she’s something, are in the garden picking beans. We are working our way down the tall shady rows, me on one side, her on the other, so’s not to miss a single ripe pod. The beans have done extry good this year and the sea-grass strings are so thick with vines that all I can see of Naomi Ruth is her hand poking in and out of the sticky green leaves. But I can hear her plain. She is aggravated at me.
“What I think,” she says in her prissy, smarty-pants voice, “is that you weren’t doing nothing but putting on a show, that time at the brush arbor.”
Her pink fingers are jumping in and out of the vines, pulling off the long fat pods with a sharp snapping sound.
“I wasn’t putting on nothing,” I say. “And I don’t remember nothing either but for standing up to leave and then laying on the ground up at the front of the arbor. I don’t know how I got there.”
The busy fingers stop and make a peek hole in the green curtain of bean vines and Naomi Ruth puts her face up to the open spot. She looks cross and sweaty and red under her poke bonnet.
“You don’t remember hollering out all them made-up words? And pointing your finger at Mr. Beale Blankenship and what you said to him?”
“No,” I say, “I done told you, I don’t remember nothing. What did I say?”
Naomi Ruth squinches up her face like she’s trying to remember. “It was crazy talk—first you hollered out that wine is a mocker, which I have heard the preacher say back of this, and then you called out something about death coming on a black horse and the horse breathing fire and smoke and running down a silver road. And you called Mr. Beale Blankenship a drunk and a sinner, which ever one knows but it weren’t fitten for you to say it, being just a little girl. And the quarest thing was that the whole time you was talking, your eyeballs was rolled back in your head till didn’t nothing show but white but you was pointing right at poor ol Beale Blankenship. And he went to trembling and turning white as a ghost and then you quit talking. First you rolled your head around and then you hit the floor like someone had knocked you down.” Naomi Ruth pushes her head through the hole in the bean vines and looks hard at me. “And you say you don’t remember none of that?”
I look down where my basket is setting and try to make a picture out of what she has told me but I can’t see nothing but the dirt and the little rocks and a devil-in-the-garden weed that we missed last time we hoed. I reach and yank it out. “No,” I say one more time, “not none of that.”
The hole in the green curtain closes back up and I hear Naomi Ruth making a hmmph sound in her throat like she don’t believe me. Her pink fingers go back to yanking the beans loose and the snapping sounds come faster and faster.
It seems like there is something big pressing on me, trying to press me down into the dirt between the rows. I turn my face up to the hot blue sky and the sun that is straight overhead. And now it seems like there is a golden ray shooting right into my eye like a rock dropping down the dark well that is the narrow place between the tall bean rows. The beam of sun shoots down the bean vine well and down the well made by the brim of my poke bonnet and right into the heart of me and I know that I have been hit by the Holy Spirit and that His flame will burn in me forever.
Dear Sis,
Well I don’t know what it is that you have herd about Dalilah Belva but yes, it is true that she was annointed by the Holy Spirit at the last revival. Those folks who are saying ugly things about her had ougt to look to their Bibles for talking in tongues and profesizing is Scripture.
Here it is right from Acts and you can give it to Ester to read and maybe that will shut her up.
1: And when the day of Pentecost was fully come, they were all with one accord in one place.
2: And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting.
3: And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them.
4: And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.
Your loving sister,
Voncel Roberts
p.s. I have canned 64 quarts of beans this week and there is more yet to come.
Chapter 8
Saved
Dark Holler, 1931
(Least)
I have waited the longest for Lilah Bel to come back. So many things has happened that I want to tell her about—starting with Brother and his girl getting married in Ransom and going off on the train and how Mama took on.
Brother come home one Sunday evening after spending the day in Ransom and as we et our supper he begun to talk about how he could make enough money in the car plants up North to send some home and we would be better off than if he stayed here on the farm. He was all worked up and talking fast and couldn’t hardly set still but kept jumping up and pacing back and forth, holding his cornbread in one hand and talking between bites.
“I saw Tony Lee Warren in town—he was home for Decoration Day—and he said he knowed the feller what does the hiring at the River Rouge plant and was I to come right on, he’d guarantee I’d get a job. You’d not credit how much they’re paying, even to fellers just starting.”
Brother stopped and stared across the table at Mama, who was setting there all pinch-mouthed and scowling. “Mama, don’t you see—there’d be money to hire the plowing done. You and Least can raise a big garden—you don’t need me fer that. And it’d just be for a year or two, time to get a little ahead with some cash—”
And then Mama jumped up out of her chair and come around the table at Brother. Her glass had knocked over when she sprung up, and buttermilk begun to run across the tabletop and off of the edge. She didn’t pay it no mind, though, just hauled off and fetched Brother a slap across his face so hard that his head rocked to one side.
“Hit’s that painted huzzy behind this, ain’t it? Got you by the pecker and now—”
“Mama!” Brother balled up his fist and pulled it back like he was going to strike. He stood there, just a-trembling all over, his nose holes all opened up like a great angry bull. “You best not say one more word iffen you want me to pass another night in this house. I swear, I’ll not stay to hear such—”
But Mama wasn’t paying him no mind; she was shouting out dreadful-sounding words, which I’d never heard most of them but I could tell they weren’t fitten. I set still there at the table, watching the thick buttermilk dripping slow to the floor. When it had all run off and Mama and Brother were still hollering, I stood up quiet-like and went out the door.
In my secret place I could still hear their voices but I couldn’t make out the hateful words. I curled up in the big smooth hol
low between the roots and listened for the drums. I hoped that they would come out soon for I felt the alonest I ever had.
Up amongst the roots was the last of my corncob babies. I had wrapped her in an old cloth and put her to bed there a long time ago when Lilah laughed at me for playing with such. I reached out for the dolly and pulled her to me and held her up against my cheek. “My pretty little baby,” I whispered to her, “don’t you cry, your mama’s here.”
Lilah Bel come at last but she is all different now. She don’t want to do nothing but play brush arbor revival and talk about Jesus and the Holy Spirit. Lilah says that I am a sinner and must come to church and get saved but I told her she knew Mama didn’t let me go nowhere on account of my spells. Besides, Mama says that ever since my daddy died, she ain’t got no use for Jesus.
But Lilah Bel says all I have to do is to say that I love Jesus and then I won’t have to burn in Hell forever. Lilah tells me all about Hell and what kind of place it is and what happens to folks who go there and I cover my ears and shake my head no. Then she tells me about Jesus and what bad folks done to Him and the story is most as awful as the one about the hatpin lady but this time I don’t take a spell. I just do like she says and get down on my knees and say that I love Jesus and will love Him forevermore.
“I don’t know,” says Lilah Bel. “By rights you had ought to be dipped in the water with the preacher saying words over you. Let’s go to the deep place in the branch and do it again. But first you need to go get you unses’ Bible so I can read out of it after you get saved.”
“What’s a Bible?” I ask her and she tells me it is a big old book with God’s words wrote down in it.
“Well,” says I, “there is several books on a high shelf in Mama’s room where she keeps the extry lamps but don’t no one ever touch them. I believe they was my daddy’s.”
